No one is trying to get you to use openclaw or nanobot, but now that they exist in the world, our agents can use the knowledge to build better tooling for us as individuals. If the projects get a lot of stars, they become part of the global training set that every coding agent is trained against, and the utility of the tooling continues to increase.
I've been running two openclaw agents, and they both made their own branchs, and modified their memory tooling to accommodate their respective tasks etc. They regularly check for upstream things that might be interesting to pull in, especially security related stuff.
It feels like pretty soon, no one is going to just have a bunch of apps on their phone written by other people. They're going to have a small set of apps custom built for exactly the things they're trying to do day to day.
Was open source ever about that? I thought it was "Hey I built this tool and I'm putting it on internet if anyone wants to use it" often accompanied by a license saying "no warranties".
> It feels like pretty soon, no one is going to just have a bunch of apps on their phone written by other people. They're going to have a small set of apps custom built for exactly the things they're trying to do day to day
I think today's AI tools like Agents are for people who are programmers but don't want to program, not ones who aren't programmers and don't want to program. As in, "no one is going to..." is a very broad statement to make for an average person who just uses apps on thier phone. Your average person will not start vibe coding their own apps just because they can (because they couldn't care less).
OpenClaw currently has 1.8k issues, 400k lines of code, had an RCE exploit discovered just a few days ago, it takes 5 seconds to get a response when I type "openclaw" in my CLI and most of the top skills are malware. I'm pretty sure training on that repository is the equivalent to eating a cyanide pill for a coding model.
I actually agree with your take that custom apps will take over a subset of established software for some users at some point, but I don't think models poisoning themselves with recklessly vibecoded bloatware is how we get there at all.
Thanks to tauri, I've now made two desktop apps and one mobile app for the first time in the last two months.
None of this was nearly as feasible just a year ago
Vibe-coded projects are high-velocity but low-entropy. They start fast, but without the "real-world learnings" baked into collaborative projects, they often plateau as soon as the problem complexity exceeds the creator's immediate focus.
The thing people are losing their shit over with OpenClaw is the autonomy. That's the common thread between it, Ralph and Gastown that is hype-inducing. It's got a lot of problems but there's a nugget of value there (just like Steve Yegge's stuff)
They are basically keep breaking different feature on every release.
The problem is local models aren't as good as the ones in the cloud. I think the success stories are people who spent like 2-4k on a beefy system to run OpenClaw or these chatbots locally.
The commands they run are, I assume like detailed versions of prompts that are essentially: "build my website." "Invest in stocks." And then watch it run for days.
When using claude code it's essentially a partnership. You need to constantly manage it and curate it for safety but also so the token count doesn't go overboard. With a fully autonomous agent and unlimited token count you can assign it to tasks where this doesn't matter as much. Did the agent screw up and write bad code? The point is you can have the system prompt engage in self correction.
Or have they have found a way to use their brains on what they deem as more useful, and less on what is rote?
I just keep coming to the conclusion about devs who use agents or other AI tooling extensively: these are programmers who did not like to program.
But I am talking about shell scripts here, cronjobs, maybe small background services. And I would never dare publish these as public applications or products. Both because I feel no pride about having "made" these - because, you know, I haven't, the AI did - and because they just aren't public facing interfaces.
I think the main issue at the moment is that so many devs are pretending that these vibecoded projects are "products". They are not. They are tailor-made, non-recyclable throwaway software for one person: The creator. I just see no world at the moment where I have any plausible reason to use someone else's vibecoded software.